The Problem With The Environment

Recently, I was watching The West Wing episode, "Life On Mars," which I think is the most underrated single episode of the show's Sorkin Period. There is Matthew Perry's exile to the steampipe trunk distribution venue, an extended discussion of the virtues of a political ad involving "hauling Saudis," a nice Ray Bradbury shout-out by Leo McGarry, Toby Ziegler's extended meditation on salads ("You could smother this with barbecue sauce and it would still taste like the ground."), the ominous augury of a window-tapping bird that inspires Donna Moss to the best Tippi Hedren reference in the history of television, and, incidentally, the scandalous end of John Hoynes's tenure as vice-president. There is also this byplay between Toby and the newly arrived Will Bailey concerning an anti-regulation attack ad.

TOBY: You think it's gonna be effective?

WILL: I think it says the President and a bunch of Hollywood types want to put your kids in a small car so that they can save the sky.

TOBY: How did the Hollywood types get into this equation?

WILL: I don't know, how do they ever?

That exchange occurred to me again while I was reading an interesting panel discussion over at the Washington Monthly concerning the problems progressive politicians have in appealing to white, working-class voters. It was interesting because the discussion moved beyond the banal notion that all Democratic candidates should go out and buy Carl Edwards ballcaps so that they can prove their yokel bona fides. I was particularly struck by this observation from Theda Skocpol:

Democrats will never appeal to most ordinary working Americans by amping up promises to enact new rights rules, environmental laws, or government programs preferred by this or that sliver of privileged constituents. Calls for straightforward job creation, wage increases, and benefits for working-aged families are the kinds of steps all working Americans can readily understand and support. If Democrats continue to champion these priorities year after year, and enact them in states or at the national level whenever they can, working-class voters, whites as well as minorities, will come to see that it really matters for them if Democrats gain majorities.

If attempts to confront the overwhelming crises in the environment—climate change, first among them—really are perceived in our politics to be issues relevant to "this or that sliver of privileged constituents," then you'll have to excuse me because I'm going off to buy some oceanside property outside of Pittsburgh. There is nothing remotely "privileged" about the people living at the sharp end of our various environmental crises. The people living in Cancer Alley in Louisiana are not privileged, neither are the people in Arkansas whose neighborhood was ruined by a pipeline break. There's nothing privileged about the people in Shishmaref, in Alaska, whose home island is falling into the sea. The people dying in our increasingly dangerous heat waves down here are people who can't afford air conditioning or, occasionally, screens. By and large, the victims of Katrina, and the victims of Sandy, were poor or, at most, lower middle class. The people who get asthma from dirty air are not living in gated communities. Environmental racism is no more an elite concern than any other kind of racism is. at least not to the people who have to live most closely with its effects. If climate change continues to worsen, and if it endangers further food production or the supply of fresh water, it is not going to be the privileged who are crushed by its consequences. I have no gripe with Skocpol's basic point. It's just that, if she's wrong, we're doomed. If she's right, we're completely and totally fcked.

(And it's impossible to ignore the effect of weaponized ignorance on the attempts to convince working-class white voters that they have skin in this game. Just look at the wingnut reaction to the president's announcement that he is appointing a task force to study the decimation of the country's bee population.Look at the fun everyone has with the whole idea! In all the laughter, you could forget the fact that, without bees, we all pretty muchstarve, and the scale of who starves when begins at the lower income levels.)

You can't have followed this issue and not realized that, too often, as political actors, the major environmental groups have dropped the ball in making the above arguments. If environmental issues have been framed as the concerns of wealthy dilettantes, if they are perceived generally as a group of Hollywood types who want to save the sky, then the people most concerned about those issues bear some responsibility for that. That having been said, I think it's a capital mistake for progressives to abandon these issues in favor of any others. If "working Americans" don't understand the mortal stakes involved in combatting climate change, which is a problem too big to be left to local control, then it is the obligation of progressives to find a way to make that case to that particular audience. It's not as though there aren't examples of how to do that. The flashy Washington marches against our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, get a lot of run on the news, but, out in the states, the fight has been carried by a legitimately bipartisan coalition of farmers, small business owners, and Native Americans. What Jane Kleeb and Randy Thompson have done in Nebraska is a legitimate model of how to frame environmental issues for a mass audience.

(And, it should be noted that, in doing this, Kleeb and Thompson were following the example set in that same state back in the late 1980's, when Nebraskans in the tiny town of Butte in Boyd County rose up and stopped the construction of a nuclear waste dump on their land. These were not privileged people, either.)

The real problem, alas, goes beyond the ineffective attempts of progressives to make the case for environmental regulations. The fact is that, in addition to all their other problems, the people most directly affected by the consequences of environmental degradation are also the people whose voices have been stifled most effectively, and who are the people most directly affected by our new sweet-tooth for voter suppression. To break out environmental issues from those other issues, is to betray the search for a solution to any of them.

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